In the past few decades, we have turned the art of advice into an industry, and marketing advice is doled out in spades. A quick Google search for “marketing advice” will net you over 300 million results, and although the cream mostly rises to the top, you shouldn’t rely on search engine algorithms to do all the curating for you.
In this article, we’ve asked five successful marketers to share, in their own words, the best marketing advice they ever got. Some of this advice can be found on the public record and some comes from personal experiences, but none of it is on the front page of Google.
Jimmy Daly, Content Marketing Entrepreneur, Editor for GetVero
In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport crystallized an idea I’ve had in my head for years. He says that the happiest and most successful people ask:
“What do I have to offer the world?” instead of “What does the world have to offer me?”
I’ve always tried to put generosity high on my list of priorities, but hearing someone explain the idea so clearly has changed the way I think about marketing. Thinking this way makes work more enjoyable. It means I can focus on helping people, and that they in turn will help me and the businesses I work with. It’s not a perfect cycle — no one owes me anything — but it’s a more meaningful way to look at marketing.
Lauren Holliday, Full-Stack Marketer, Founder of Freelanship
I think my best piece of marketing advice was from two people – Neil Patel and Dan Schawbel. Neil had told me once to send 50 emails a week, and Dan said he used to send as many as 300. As Mark Cuban says, “Every no gets me closer to a yes.”
Did you know that 70% of unanswered sales email chains stopped after the first attempt, and that it’s highly unlikely that someone will email you back if they don’t within the first day? People may say this is sales advice, but it’s very much marketing advice too. FOLLOW UP, and EMAIL, EMAIL, EMAIL!!! Because relationships trump everything.
This advice has done everything for my career. It’s how I have the amazing mentors and advisors I do. It’s how I’ve gotten more than 700 signups to Freelanship. It’s how I have the clients I have today. I’m able to meet and surpass my goals and keep moving up professionally because of the people, such as Dan and Neil for instance, who are there when I have a question or don’t know how to do something. That’s absolutely invaluable — priceless. If I had never emailed them and everyone else, I wouldn’t be where I am today FOR SURE.
Scott Aughtmon, Author of 51 Content Marketing Hacks, Regular Contributor to ContentMarketingInstitute.com
“The few who do are the envy of the many who only watch.” – Jim Rohn
Most of us don’t need more knowledge. We don’t need more books or more conferences.
We need more action. We need more application. If we had more action – more application of the truth, then our lives could be changed powerfully forever!
What I am trying to say is this….
You might not believe this, but many of us already know everything we need to know to see massive results happen in our life. We just need to take action.
For most of my life, I didn’t notice or care about marketing. But in 1999, I put up a website in a small music sub-genre and I wanted to figure out how to build traffic. I then began to read everything I could about marketing. I read every online guru there was in the late 90s, classic marketing book, or current marketing book I could get my hands on. And in the process I found out that I not only had an interest in marketing, but my mind was wired in that way.
I grew that small site to become probably one of the top five or so sites in that niche. It was the dot com boom in Silicon Valley, I was working as a Youth Pastor for Jr. High and High School kids, and I needed a way to make extra income. We were having a difficult time surviving financially after having our first child. We were having a difficult time because we decided to have my wife stay home and we were trying to survive off of just my income.
I later read an ebook from someone who revealed an easy way to create an information product. He said you could interview top experts in a niche and then just compile them into a book. Well, I did more than read that idea. I took action. I used that idea to put together my first volume for my first ebook, How Your Business Can Survive and Prosper in a Recession.
This one decision to take action put me on the path that I am on today. This applies to the web marketing/inbound marketing industry because no marketing information will ever produce results without action.
Sujan Deswal – Inbound Marketer at AdPushup – Contributor at TheNextWeb and SEMRush
The best marketing advice I’ve heard is my elder brother’s advice, who also happens to be a SaaS marketer. His advice being – “Keep on providing unique value and you’ll be respected among your peers and be irreplaceable in any organization.”
On the surface, this might seem like quite a naive notion, but believe me, it’s the first thing that will build your reputation as an expert in your industry (the second being getting results).
I follow this advice by writing unique and actionable insights for our target audience that will either help them solve a painpoint or run their business better. Every post that gets published on our company’s blog is written keeping this in mind. Do we muddle the line between pushing out unique content every time versus reaching our KPIs? Hell no. To us and any marketer worth his salt – quality will always trump quantity.
Brian Lang – Content Marketer, Founder of Small Business Ideas Blog
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
At a certain point, I dumped the whole passive income mindset. If you are willing to work harder than everyone else, then you’re more likely to be successful. Hard work and continuous self-improvement is a must, to stand out, particularly with content marketing.
Most people that are successful, even in the “passive income” space work really hard. People who just want to do the minimum to create a passive income stream so they don’t have to work have a lazy mindset. That’s what causes most people to fail online and in business.